UNIDENTIFIED FICTIONARY OBJECTS

Curated by Ami Clarke (Banner Repeater).

Offsite productions: Present Fictions at David Roberts Art Foundation

29 March 2014

Whilst the paradox of science fiction is everyday, artists are testing the limits of language as code, blurring the distinction between computational linguistics and natural language, hinting that technology is not merely a medium to represent thoughts that already exist but is capable of dynamic interactions producing the thoughts it describes.

The following presentations act as a spring-board for the forthcoming exhibition Snow Crush at Banner Repeater in May.

Oral Backstory? by Erica Scourti live performance. A feedback loop produced by reading the past month’s search history into Google’s voice activated search function, activating voice as both semantic and operative, and generating text and image through an interplay of spoken language, voice recognition software and search algorithms.

Robots Building Robots by Tyler Coburn - live reading by Chris Polick - meditates on the “lights out” factory, so-named for the lack of need for regular, human supervision. The book takes form as a travelogue of improvised performances, which Coburn conducted at a science park in Southern Taiwan; rumour has it that a robotics company is presently building one such facility on site. During a long walk through the park’s grounds, the author considers literary and philosophical speculations on labour, machinic intelligence and the “automatic factory”: an enduring fiction gradually creeping into reality.

Zoepic by Jesse Darling, performance lecture with powerpoint, 2014. “There is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself [kata to ze?n auto monon]. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoe?] as if it were a kind of serenity [eue?meria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness.” Aristotle, “Politics”, 350 bc

Error-Correction: an introduction to future diagrams (take 3): Impossible Structures “the eye that remains of the me that was I” HD video (08:19 mins) and pamphlet (script) by Ami Clarke.  (Error-Correction App – available soon).  A series of experimental takes of an on-going enquiry into diagrams, that reference and include appropriated texts, whereby the voice, through language, is constituted “between someone else’s thoughts and the page’, and considers the production of meaning through inference, association, paradox, and contradiction.

Programme:

Erica Scourti    20 mins – live performance

Tyler Coburn  10 mins – live reading by Chris Polick

Jesse Darling 15 mins – performance lecture with powerpoint

Ami Clarke – playing throughout – HD video (08:19 mins) and pamphlet (A5).

Bios.

Jesse Darling lives and works in LDN & wherever. S/he works in installation, digital, “dasein by design”, and the space in which performance becomes unmediated experience, researching ways to #occupy [and resist] the contested territory of subjectivity, sociality and the physical body. S/he is currently finishing an MFA at Slade and has exhibited, performed and published internationally. 

Tyler Coburn is an artist and writer based in New York.

Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece and now lives and works in London where she completed an MRes in Moving Image Art and St Martins and LUX (2013). Recent exhibitions include La Voix Humaine, Munich Kunstverein, Afresh: a New Generation of Greek Artists at Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Home/s at Benaki Museum Athens, Different Domain at The Royal Standard and A Small Hiccup at Grand Union, Newbridge Project and Limoncello.

Ami Clarke is an artist who both facilitates the running of Banner Repeater: a reading room and project space on Platform 1, Hackney Downs train station, opening up an experimental space for others, whilst dually sharing the goal in her practice to explore ideas that come of publishing, distribution, and dissemination: how the performance of language increasingly impacts upon daily life.